Picture it: you're 17 at your friend's house, and his parents are gone for the weekend, so he decides to throw a party. In a moment of quiet, you turn to your friend and, out of genuine concern for your faculties — or an unconscious, unspoken competition — you ask, "Hey man, do you feel the alcohol? Because I'm pretty fucked up."
This scene is reflexive. It's a memory and a dream familiar to you, me and director Ethan Eng.
Therapy Dogs, the debut feature from Mississauga native Eng, captures the life of Cawthra Park Secondary School's graduating class of 2019 as they get closer to finishing high school and moving on with their lives.
Really, though, it's an eerily accurate snapshot of every graduating class in suburban Ontario. The movie is episodic and occasionally impressionistic, mixed with a dash of fiction, but it doesn't attempt to varnish or sentimentalize the experience. The range of filming devices — which include GoPros, cellphones and more professional cameras — are combined with certain editing techniques that would make Sammy Fabelman jealous.
It's all in service of a traditionally plotless but inventive and sweet film on the transition from childhood to adulthood. Once the idea of how little has changed since graduation is overcome, the specificity of the world is better appreciated, including its still resonant anxieties.
Eng, who tells his classmates he's filming a movie for the yearbook, manages to capture the listlessness inherent in this period. That this DIY production became a narrative at all is a testament to his talent. He's both subject and observer in the period of life where one is waiting for it to start, either via a lightbulb moment or an inciting incident. So, to stave off boredom and the inevitable, days are spent doing irresponsible shit with friends.
Eng, along with his friend and co-writer Justin Morrice, may have been a tad more reckless than others at the same age. Scenes of child endangerment include jumping off a bridge into the water, narrowly avoiding a passing GO train, and drifting in the parking lot while one of them is strapped to the roof.
At a certain point, these scenes of male intuition, or the lack of it, are flipped on their head. Friendships are tested and sometimes, in the search for authenticity, the closest bonds begin to drift apart.
(Mongrel Media)This scene is reflexive. It's a memory and a dream familiar to you, me and director Ethan Eng.
Therapy Dogs, the debut feature from Mississauga native Eng, captures the life of Cawthra Park Secondary School's graduating class of 2019 as they get closer to finishing high school and moving on with their lives.
Really, though, it's an eerily accurate snapshot of every graduating class in suburban Ontario. The movie is episodic and occasionally impressionistic, mixed with a dash of fiction, but it doesn't attempt to varnish or sentimentalize the experience. The range of filming devices — which include GoPros, cellphones and more professional cameras — are combined with certain editing techniques that would make Sammy Fabelman jealous.
It's all in service of a traditionally plotless but inventive and sweet film on the transition from childhood to adulthood. Once the idea of how little has changed since graduation is overcome, the specificity of the world is better appreciated, including its still resonant anxieties.
Eng, who tells his classmates he's filming a movie for the yearbook, manages to capture the listlessness inherent in this period. That this DIY production became a narrative at all is a testament to his talent. He's both subject and observer in the period of life where one is waiting for it to start, either via a lightbulb moment or an inciting incident. So, to stave off boredom and the inevitable, days are spent doing irresponsible shit with friends.
Eng, along with his friend and co-writer Justin Morrice, may have been a tad more reckless than others at the same age. Scenes of child endangerment include jumping off a bridge into the water, narrowly avoiding a passing GO train, and drifting in the parking lot while one of them is strapped to the roof.
At a certain point, these scenes of male intuition, or the lack of it, are flipped on their head. Friendships are tested and sometimes, in the search for authenticity, the closest bonds begin to drift apart.
